


a family found

by starsandsecrets



Series: a few wild souls [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Car Accident, F/M, Families of Choice, Family, Found Family, Lance (Voltron)-centric, Lance’s POV, Langst, M/M, Probably ooc, Short Paragraphs, The Shittest Thing I Have Ever Wrote, introduction, klance, literally no dialogue, shallura - Freeform, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 03:28:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15428040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsandsecrets/pseuds/starsandsecrets
Summary: How family changed through Lance’s years. The family he was given and family he found.





	a family found

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! So this shitty story is from the same universe(?) as ‘as the clocks chimed’ which is a keith-centric story i wrote at the beginning of the year. this is really crappy partly because i’ve been really unmotivated and in and out of doctor’s appointments. i wrote the majority of this when i was admitted to hospital so i was really tired. i wanted to get something up as i think it might help me be more inspired! i do want to write more involving these versions of the characters and their backstorys. please enjoy! and i would love some criticism!
> 
> Also I just posted the second chapter to ‘a song for someone’ which is my klance fic. I would really appreciate if you checked it out!

**Lance’s Family**

Lance had always felt loved. From the moment he’d opened his eyes when he was a baby to his first word. From when he learned to talk and walk. He could always remember an overwhelming feeling of loved, and an urge to love just as intensely.

Love, he was taught, was a powerful thing. Romantic love could break down mountains with it’s intensity, could drain rivers and knock down houses. But familial love could carefully build things back up. It could refill the empty rivers. It was cautious but unhesitating. Obvious but underestimated.

“ _Lance_ ,” his mother told him frequently through his years. “ _If you are going to break something, make sure you have the tools to rebuild it first_.”

He rolled his eyes when he was told this the first time. But when he fell in love for the first time, the first time he got his heart broken and his mother held him in her arms and whispered the same words in his ears.

He learnt that love was a precious thing and he was lucky that he was so surrounded by it. By his brothers and sisters, by his father.

When his mother fell ill his world came crashing down. He felt like everything was the wrong way round and nothing was real. Except it was. That was reality. And every time she collapsed or was rushed to hospital he was reminded of that. As he held her frail hands and watched his siblings unenthusiastically play with the toys the nurses had brought in.

He prayed that love could save her. If it was so powerful, like he was taught, why did it only make this so much more _painful_?

His family was falling apart and he was so desperately trying to thread the needle to sew them back together.

 

** Hunk **

Lance met Hunk when he was six. Two bright-eyed, sheltered children playing in the park. The only thing troubling them was whether to play astronauts or pirates, or at his house or Hunk’s.

It wasn’t hard to make friends at this point, but he and Hunk gravitated towards each other like magnets. They had agreed, as children so often do, to become best friends after Hunk had offered him one of his best Pokèmon cards and Lance looked at him with wide eyes like he’d given him the moon.

They grew older together, never growing apart. Hunk’s house became Lance’s and Lance’s became Hunk’s. Secrets were not a familiar thing when it came to one another. If it belonged to one it belonged to the other, a rule that made sense to them because it was the only one they’d ever known.

When Lance’s mother got sick when he was fourteen, Hunk’s family was there for him. Bringing food his parents prepared so his dad could go out and work. Picking up his younger siblings from school.

Doing things that Lance wished he was old enough to do.

When Lance was fifteen and he started to realise he liked boys just as much as girls. He was scared that, for the first time, that he would lose Hunk. Logically he knew he wouldn’t, Hunk had been there through the darkest times of his mother’s illness but everything seemed like too much these days, he didn’t need this extra stress on the pile.

Of course when Lance arrived at his door in the early hours of the morning, clothes sopping wet in the pouring rain because he couldn’t keep the secret in anymore, Hunk was just as accepting as he thought he would be.

When Lance’s mother died when he was sixteen, Hunk mourned her like he would a mother. What belonged to one belonged to the other, this included the grief that they shared. It also included the responsibility they they felt over Lance’s younger brothers and sisters.

They both remembered the promise they had made to each other when they were children and the boys _clung_ to it, and to each other.

There was no specific point in Lance’s life as to when Hunk became family. It was unspoken, a silent agreement they had come to at some early point in their friendship that they had transitioned from simple friends, to brothers.

 

** Pidge **

They first time Lance met Pidge he was fifteen and hiding behind a vending machine in the hospital, his head buried in his knees, hands pressed into his eyes to try and stop the tears leaking out.

They were this small figure, large glasses slipping off their nose as they looked at him curiously before dropping themself to the floor beside him. They didn’t speak, but the presence of this strange person was surprisingly comforting. They introduced themself as Katie but said everyone called them Pidge and they was here because of their brother, Matt, who had injured himself conducting some sort of experiment.

They was blunt and obvious and almost harsh but they made Lance want to tell them everything.

So he did.

It turned out Matt was a regular at the hospital, recklessly doing some strange things in the name of science so Pidge was a familiar, comforting sight.

They would meet behind the vending machine whenever they were both at the hospital. More often than not they would sit in silence, calmed by each other. Sometimes they both would talk, these short meetings taught them both a lot about each other. Lance knew Pidge was fourteen but inhumanly smart for their age, he knew they wanted to work in robotics, he knew that they was secretly more vulnerable than they let on.

Lance told Pidge his fears, for his mother and his family.

He told Pidge secrets that he couldn’t voice to anyone like how some deep part of him wished that this was over, that his mother would just go so everyone could move on from the standstill they were in. How it made him feel like a _monster_.

They were short pockets of joy that he felt in the miserable times at the hospital.

After Lance’s mother passed away, Pidge had pulled Lance from his sobbing family and held him as he screamed.

They had pressed their phone number in his hand and threatened to slap him if he decided be a self-destructing idiot and didn’t call.

He called.

Pidge quickly joined Hunk and Lance’s duo, fitting in like they had always been there. The three musketeers, ready to take on the world.

It didn’t take long for Lance to consider Pidge family. They were a bright, if not sarcastic, light in the darkness while his family was falling apart. Too wise for their age, talking sense into him when it was a foreign concept. A snarky little sibling figure.

 

** Shiro and Allura **

Lance never expected to befriend Takashi Shirogane. He was everything Lance wasn’t; he was popular, everyone wanted to be his friend. He was smart too, top grades and planning to attend a university specialising in astrophysics. Lance wanted to resent Takashi but he couldn’t, no matter how much Lance wished he had his perfect life. Lance was a sophomore and he was a senior, they weren’t in the same circle or on the same the level.

Until the accident.

The whole school heard about it. They talked about how the football team went out drinking. How drunk they all got. How a group of them, including Takashi, all got in a car and sped down the freeway. They all talked about how the drunk teenager driving passed out at the wheel and swerved. Two of them died when the car flipped.

Takashi lost an arm. Takashi lost his memories.

The next time he saw Takashi was when his mother died and he went to a support group for kids having a ‘hard time’ that Hunk had forced him to go to.

Takashi had dark circles under his eyes and seemed to shake constantly; a shell of the confident, almost obnoxious, boy he had been. Lance sat down next to him, he was glad there was someone there he recognised even if he didn’t recognise Lance.

Lance kept attending the support group, it gave him relief in the stressful days. It was only after a month that he heard Takashi talk. In a raspy voice he spoke of his fear that he wouldn’t remember anything from his past, that he would never be able to live a normal life because of his arm, that he didn’t want to be Takashi anymore because he _wasn’t_ him.

Lance suggested a nickname, and Shiro was born.

The next week he talked to Lance directly.

And the next week.

And they next week.

They slowly became friends. Shiro never regained his full memory, the crash never came back but they both thought that was because of the trauma and not the amnesia.

They began seeing each other outside of the support group, meeting up with Hunk and Pidge and playing video games or meeting in the local café for a quieter time.

It was one of those meeting where Shiro met Allura. She was a waitress, new to town. She said she was trying to prove her independence to her father by working a few jobs so she could buy an apartment. Shiro fell head over heels, no exaggeration needed. He once told Lance that Allura was this light in his life who didn’t know about his past or his mistakes, she wasn’t biased, she was just herself.

_Lance wanted something like that._

Allura was initiated into the friendship group once she started dating Shiro. Unlike his relationship with Shiro, his and Allura’s was born not from bonding over fear, but hope. Their hope for Shiro. Their hope for each other. Their general hope for the world that she helped them both relearn.

Shiro became family first, he wanted to be protected by them but also to protect them at the same time. But Allura followed surely, a mother figure (even though she wasn’t that much older) that guided them over the tough terrains.

 

**Keith**

The first time he met Keith he was eighteen years old. Just graduated and planning to go to the local university on a partial scholarship. For once in his life everything was going smooth with no bumps in the road. His friends had never been better, Hunk was going to university with him, Pidge had another year left in school and Shiro and Allura were planning to move in together.

He still missed his mother but after two years the pain of grief wasn’t such a overwhelming pain that shook his whole body, more like a dull, constant ache in his chest.

That was until Keith showed up.

Him and the rest of his group had got a call from Shiro at three in the morning, a frantic ‘ _get here right now_ ’ being whispered through the phone. Of course the obliged, they were family, why wouldn’t they?

They arrived at Shiro’s tiny flat he shared with some questionable people around four and when they walked in they were met with a sight.

A boy with dark hair was lying on the ragged couch, blood and bruises on his face. Shiro was running around like a mother hen, the only sounds were his huffs and the boy’s raspy breathing.

Shiro was interrogated as to why there was a beaten up kid on his couch (the boy chimed in with his dazed voice, “I’m not a kid.”). Shiro explained that he was walking back from the store when he saw a fight, three men delivering blow after blow on the kid (“I’m not a kid.” “Be quiet.”). Shiro had scared the men off, and dragged the half-conscious boy back to his apartment, then proceeded to have a breakdown. He didn’t call the cops because the boy was homeless (“Fucking hell, my name’s Keith.”).

They learned that Keith was a foster kid, same age as Lance and Hunk. He told them bitterly that he had no living family that wanted him, and no foster ones either. They learned he’d been homeless for two years, running away when he was sixteen. He was half-conscious when he told them this and Lance couldn’t help but feel that if he were fully awake he would not be this ready to give away his secrets. He was right.

The next morning, when Keith had recovered slightly he became more cornered animal than human. His eyes wide and confused, fists clenched for a fight. It sent a pang through Lance, he wondered what had happened to Keith to make him this way.

Keith stayed with Shiro for around a year, then when Shiro finally moved in with Allura, Lance reluctantly offered to take him in.

Within the first week of Keith living there Lance decided that he hated him. He was competitive and overall frustrating to be around. Or at least that was the case for the first six months, then something changed.

His and Keith’s so called rivalry died down, they became actual friends. Lance realised Keith was more than his previous views, he was protective, undyingly loyal to his friends and kinder than anyone he had ever met.

He wasn’t sure when it had changed or what it was but something had shifted. Lance tried to ignore his feelings. To forget them.

The realisation was slow growing, it took him over a year to understand. It was like a slap in the face or an electric shock when he finally did.

Lance was in love with Keith.

Keith becoming family to him was something he didn’t expect, or even want at first. It snuck up behind him. Keith was family before a lover. It became clear to him, Keith was his family the moment Shiro found him. The moment he saw him lying on that couch.

They were family and they could rebuild whatever happened to them as long as they had each other.

_His mother was right._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


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